Metadesigning For Children
Twelfth meeting held with Dan Griner and John Wood on 11th March 2022
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Book Buddies
- Book Buddies are small groups (or pairs) of co-readers who build mutual bonds (c.f. jeong) through mutually supportive learning processes of creative reading.
- Book Buddies can be defined as creative ensembles.
- As such, they might work as a creative duet or a creative quartet.
- As such their level of usefulness could be self-monitored using criteria based on the sympoiesis concept.
Complementary Books
- 'Complementary books' are 2 or more volumes that work synergistically together.
- They might, therefore consist of a first book, plus an appendix, supplement, or second version.
- They could be designed to bring individual readers into different levels of understanding
- The deliberate differentiation between readers would (also) be designed to encourage the exchange and creative combination of different types of knowledge.
A Children's Metadesign Series
- VISION: Practical design books for children that lead to books that enable the re-designing of design.
- In English, the word 'Design' comes from Latin words such as designare meaning “to mark out” as in plotting a new building's foundations.
- In Scandinavia, the word 'Formgiving' also means 'design'.
- In France it refers to 'drawing' (i.e. 'dessin').
- In Germany it implies 'wholeness' ('Gestaltung'), so these ideas could be exemplified to inspire and encourage the reader to be unconstrained by conventional methods and materials.
- The Hindi word 'Jugaad' refers to a low-cost form of inventiveness.
We All Design Things
- What these different words tell us is that design does not need to be elaborate or fancy. Everyone can design. Humans have been doing it for millions of years.
- Charles Eames saw design as "a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose”.
- Herbert Simon saw even more simply as the ability to move from ‘given to preferred situations’. (Herbert Simon, 1969)
- If we see it like this, design is very similar to management in the sense that they are just different approaches to the realisation of an idea (Zymunt Bauman, 2006).
- Effective designs usually combine visual rhetoric, grace and illusion, so the Chinese word for design (設計) means, in essence, set up trick. EXAMPLE:
- Book 'A' could tell a story (a 'trick' to be marvelled at) using familiar children's book protocols.
- Book 'B' would tell a story about how Book 'A', thus deconstructing the 'trick'.
- Book 'B' (or a third book - 'C') would offer very practical production details that encouraged immediate creative action.
- Together the series would encourage Book Buddies to create their own books in a playful way.
We Can Re-design How We Design
- See the Metadesign Manifesto for an attempt to explain metadesign simply.
- See a list of metadesign keywords and some of our interpretation of their possible meanings.